


Hell Is Other People's Dishes

by orphan_account



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Gen, Humor, Mary Sue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-06
Updated: 2010-01-06
Packaged: 2017-10-05 21:08:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/46052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the apocalypse, Angel finds a new start in Boston.  Also, Angel finds himself on DVD.  Among other things.  No UST whatsoever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hell Is Other People's Dishes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Minnow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minnow/gifts).



> I can only say that I was procrastinating on packing to move when I wrote this.

Angel wouldn't have called himself the foremost expert on hell, or hell dimensions, but he'd been around the block a time or two and he had a pretty good idea what to expect: fire and chains and knives of ice, torturers' basements in sunny suburban homes, the faces of fish from inside a casket--

Okay, that last hadn't been hell, strictly speaking, but being drowned by your son had to count for something.

He knew when he signed away shanshu and faced down the Black Thorn that a hell of some kind would be awaiting him.

He just hadn't expected it to look like _this_.

The Powers That Be had been very specific, in that splitting-headache epilepsy-inducing-vision way of theirs, that this was the address where his atonement for blowing up half of L.A. was supposed to begin. He would rather have started at the library, to find out what had happened to L.A. while he floated in a limbo that consisted mostly of floating lights and undulating shadows--a look at the Boston Metro on the way to this address had shown him that some years had passed--or at the least somewhere with a TV.

He had skulked about the street when the sun set, peering through the windows. From what he could tell, the apartment's inhabitants were even messier than Cordelia at her worst. (He tried to think positive thoughts about Cordelia. Mostly he succeeded in thinking about that last kiss.) Cordelia had had a taste for expensive things, and it showed in her choice of furnishings. These people had their computers set up on what looked like a $40 folding table from Target.

Then again, he had lived in the sewers eating rats for a few decades, so who was he to criticize?

Finally he got up his nerve and went to the door. Naturally, the label on the mailbox had peeled away into illegibility. He would just have to ask for a name. He rang the doorbell.

"Coming," a female voice called. The door didn't open, but he glimpsed movement through the peephole. "Who are you and what do you want?"

Angel tried to look unthreatening. "I'm supposed to help," he blurted out.

The voice sounded deeply suspicious. "Thanks, but we're not buying."

This was already not going well. "No, I mean--I've been sent to help. Are you in some kind of trouble?"

There was a crashing sound from further in the house. Angel heard the voice mutter something under her breath that sounded curiously like--"sporks"? That couldn't be right. "The outfit is very convincing," the voice said grudgingly, "but you can go bother someone else now."

"It's not an outfit," he said, "I'm real." Even if people had given him some funny looks on the T for wearing a black trenchcoat during a Boston summer. Wait a second. "Convincing"? "What do you think I am?"

"You're dressed up like Angel," the voice said.

He really wished he could kick down that door. Or go away. But the Powers That Be had _said_, START HERE in neon colors inside his head. Which meant this woman was in some kind of danger. That was the way things worked, wasn't it? "Dressed up like"? It seemed she recognized him somehow--"I'm for real," he said. Where were his old business cards when he needed them? Aside from the fact that they had an L.A. area code on them. Angel glanced up and down the street. A woman was walking her dog. He impatiently waited until she had rounded the corner, then shifted into his other face. "Please. I really am here to help." A gamble: "The Powers That Be sent me."

There was a pause. Angel was afraid that he'd lost her. Then the door opened. He saw a small, rumpled woman--Korean? Japanese? he couldn't tell and wasn't going to offend her by asking--who looked like she needed a few weeks' worth of sleep. "You're kidding, right?" the woman said. "If I am not in fact hallucinating you, then you died in an alley in L.A. Because I know what those odds looked like, and they sure as heck weren't in your favor."

Angel blinked and shifted his face back. "You were there?"

"I saw it on DVD," the woman said loftily.

Angel was certain he had slipped into an alternate dimension. He didn't remember a TV crew being in the alley behind the Hyperion. "I can't come in unless you--"

"Come in," she said.

Angel wasn't sure the woman's logic circuits were all there if she _believed him_ and was inviting him in, but he wasn't planning on becoming a murderous psychopath and drinking her blood, so it should all work out. He stepped in and let the woman lead him down the hall into a living room. If anything, the apartment looked even worse from the inside. He peeked through a doorway at a room full of boxes and thought: Aha. No wonder the place was a mess. She was packing to move.

"Have you been menaced by demons recently?" he asked dubiously.

"You're the only one I've seen," she said. "Ever. Although I have a lizard..."

What?

She laughed. "Our toddler. She is definitely an oni. We call her the lizard."

Oni--oh, Japanese. Demon. He looked around, half-expecting to be ambushed by a gleeful toddler, despite the hour.

"She's with her grandmother in another state, so no, you can't drink her. Tempted as I would be to feed her to you."

Angel was appalled. Then he saw the expression in the woman's eyes. "You miss her."

She shrugged. "Yeah, well. You try packing with a toddler underfoot." She turned red. "I forgot. You didn't exactly get to enjoy that phase of Connor's life."

Angel went very still and counted the breaths he wasn't taking. "You know about Connor?"

"DVDs are _wonderful_," she said.

He looked around for a TV and didn't see one.

"We play them on the computer," she said. "Really, don't you know anything?"

"I think Wolfram &amp; Hart ripped me off," Angel said, "if there's a whole dimension--this is another dimension?--of people who know about Connor. Could I--could I see your DVDs?" Maybe _this_ was what the Powers had sent him for?

The woman crossed her arms. "I just _packed_ those DVDs. You can rent them yourself."

"I have this stunning lack of electricity, TV, DVD player, and money," Angel said. The Powers That Be had literally set him back on earth with the clothes on his back and the shoes on his feet and nothing more. "Please." Connor--the thought of seeing Connor again, even from afar, even on a _DVD_\--

"And yet," the woman said softly, "you haven't asked about L.A. Or Spike. Or Gunn. Or Illyria. Or any of these other people whom I hope I will not hallucinate into appearing on my doorstep."

Angel looked away for a moment. "L.A.'s still here?"

"It never happened here," she said. "We had other things--oh, I'd have to check Wikipedia. I don't remember the timeline. I didn't watch things as they aired."

What-a-pedia?

"But if you're here," she said, "maybe--wherever you came from--maybe people survived. And maybe for godsake you'll consider calling the National Guard next time you trigger a localized apocalypse."

"There won't be a next time." He hoped.

She laughed at him. "Then maybe you've learned."

"The DVDs--"

She looked around, then slumped onto a folding chair. "Do you realize how many CDs and DVDs I would have to dig through? And then I'd have to _repack_ them, and I'm supposed to be packing the dishes and here I am talking to someone who isn't supposed to exist and--"

"Whoa there."

She stopped.

What was the phrase--"_Daijoubu desu._" _It's okay._ He tried to look reassuring, which was, admittedly, not one of his greatest skills.

She blinked. "_Arigatou, demo watashi wa nihongo o hanashimasen. Kankokujin desu._" _Thank you, but I don't speak Japanese. I'm Korean._ Then she added, "I didn't say that in Korean because has anyone told you that your Korean is wretched?"

He gave her an injured look.

"Tell you what. I'll let you watch all the DVDs you want if you (a) help me repack them and (b) help me pack the _dishes_."

"Why would the Powers That Be want me to pack dishes?" Angel wondered.

She ignored that. "Which episodes do you want to watch? Oh, whatever--" She hopped over to her computer and typed something. It brought up a list. "Read the summaries, it's not like you care about spoilers, and figure out what you want to watch."

"Did something break while you were talking to me?" he asked belatedly.

The woman bit her lip. "Yeah, I left something precariously balanced and it tipped over, but nothing broke."

She went off to wash and dry more dishes while Angel read through the Wikipedia summary of what had happened. It sounded so--petty. Sordid. All their mistakes and follies and desperate attempts to get things right, to help the hopeless and save themselves, in not-always-grammatical prose.

What he really wanted was to watch S3 and S4, to watch Connor and Cordelia all over again, even the bad parts, even the parts where he had wanted so badly to kill the both of them no matter how much he loved them both, Connor as a baby and Connor as Destroyer and Cordelia with a sword and Cordelia smiling and--

(Very carefully, he didn't think about Wesley.)

But that chapter of his life was done.

He said, "'Not Fade Away.' I like that."

She said, in a neutral voice, "Someone had to explain the title to me. Several someones, actually. I live under a rock sometimes, can you tell?"

"Sewers," he said. "No TV. Rats for breakfast."

"Okay, you win."

Together, they went to a bin overflowing with CDs and DVD sets, and dug until they found Angel S5. Angel endured it while the woman showed him how to work the DVD Player on her computer. Then, mercifully, she went away to curse at the dishes some more--she really was saying "spork"--and he stared at names he didn't know, and faces he did.

"That's it?" he said when "Not Fade Away" was finished. "It ends with me swinging my sword?" He missed that sword. He missed problems that could be reduced to good-vs.-evil and the sweet certainty of violence.

"Say again?" the woman said over the sound of running water.

Angel repeated himself.

"Yeah, well, I didn't film the episode," she said. She turned off the water and stared at the heap of dishes. "How am I ever going to get these all packed? My drying rack is out of space."

Angel remembered his promise. There were several hours left to the night. "Here, let me help."

Of course, five minutes later his coatsleeve caught on the drying rack and he brought the whole thing tumbling down. Even with his reflexes, he only managed to save some of the dishes. The woman looked like she was ready to cry.

"I'm sorry," Angel said, feeling inadequate. He knew how to deal with demons and evil lawyers, but broken dishes? And he couldn't even offer to buy her some new china. Hell, he didn't even have a handkerchief. He took off his coat, which he should have done earlier.

She grabbed a paper towel and wiped her eyes furiously. "It's not your fault. I mean, it is, but it's not your fault that I left all this to the last minute."

"You sit down and"--what did humans do for comfort in times of distress?--"eat ice cream or something. I'll pick up the broken pieces."

She smiled wanly. "We don't have any ice cream in the freezer." But she sat down anyway and watched while he cleaned the floor. "Do you ever regret it?" she asked, apparently feeling the need to make conversation.

"Regret which part of what?" The question was so broad in scope that Angel was sure he could write a dissertation on it.

"Signing it away," she said. "Humanity. Or heck, deciding to go back to the Oracles and becoming a vampire again."

He was no longer surprised that she knew about that one golden day of being human. The people who made the DVDs had a lot to answer for, though. Angel thought for a while, then said, "Of course I do. But I can still do some of the things that make people human. Like breaking dishes, or picking up after myself, or helping where I can."

After Angel vacuumed up the remaining fragments, they began packing dishes. Angel began suspecting that the woman was just generally disorganized, judging from the trouble she had folding up the parchment paper in anything like origami neatness. Angel had long experience of moving, with items a lot more fragile (and expensive) than anything she owned.

"Are you looking for a way back home?" she asked.

"I don't know what I'm looking for," Angel said. "If this is where I'm supposed to be, I'll do what I can. Although it's a little inconvenient being recognized by the general population."

"People will just assume you're in costume," she said. "Better yet, dress in bright colors and _no one_ will recognize you."

After another long silence, Angel said, "Do you know what happened--what happened to the others?"

The woman shook her head. "We speculate, but we don't know. I guess that's for you to find out."

They finished packing the last box of dishes. Angel played the last chapter of "Not Fade Away" again, even though it hurt to remember that rain, the hordes of demons, the smell of Gunn's blood. Then Angel ejected the DVD and put it back in its case. "I think I've seen enough," he said, torn though he was.

"Really? You only watched one episode."

"It's not all about what I've done," Angel said. "It's about what I'm going to do next."

"I guess," she said. Then she looked at the piles of boxes. "Thank you, by the way."

"After breaking your dishes, it's the least I can do."

"I can always get more dishes," she said. "Preferably in plastic, in case you visit again." She was smiling.

They both knew he wouldn't be back again.

"How are you going to know who to help, by the way?" she asked. "I mean, there's no one with visions--"

"I'll just have to do what the rest of the world does," Angel said, "and figure it out myself." He put his coat back on.

"Or with friends," she said. "You are allowed to have friends, you know."

He thought of all the people he had gotten killed, and his mouth twisted. "I'll try."

The woman yawned. "Goodnight and good luck," she said, "and try not to end the world if you really don't have to."

He nodded gravely. "Goodnight," he said.

He stepped out into the night. He hadn't told her, but on second viewing, there had been an additional clip just between the final sword-swing and end credits, for barely two frames: another address, in handwriting he recognized as Cordelia's. Someone was still looking out for him. He wondered if the woman would ever see that scene. He suspected not.

Boston was no City of Angels, but people were people everywhere. It was time to get to work.


End file.
